Chetwood, William Rufus

, was once a bookseller in Covent-garden, and many years after prompter at Drurylane Theatre, and an instructor of young actors. After passing through the miserable vicissitudes of inferior dramatic rank, he died poor, March 1766. He wrote some pieces, long since forgotten, for the stages, and in 1749, published “A General History of the Stage,” which although undervalued by the editors of the Biographia Dramatica, is amusing, and contains much of the information transferred since into compilations of that kind. ²